As businesses continue to grow, they require sophisticated tools to manage various types of information and provide businesses with the ability to capture information, integrate the information with existing systems, and provide access to the information. Some businesses utilize custom-built applications, such as e-commerce platforms or call-centers. Many businesses may use a conglomeration of tools that are created using different programming languages and use a variety of persistencies, such as flat files, hierarchical databases, relational databases, or content management systems. Some applications are information-centric applications such as master data management systems and data warehousing systems. Across all these systems, often the same process may be implemented in a variety of ways, thereby leading to the capture of information in an inconsistent manner. This may lead to data inaccuracies which lead to inefficiencies within or across the systems. In some cases, certain business objects may be utilized across multiple business processes and need a consistent definition across all the business processes. A business object can consist of one or multiple tables. Each table can consist of one or multiple attributes. A business object can be used in one or multiple business processes.
There are generally at least two different phases of a business transformation implementation project, the blueprint phase and realization phase. During the blueprint phase, as the business process teams define the new business processes, a functional data analyst may align their appropriate work stream and capture the functional data requirements for each of the new sub-processes as they are discussed in workshops and follow-up meetings. Each major business process domain may represent an independent work stream. A master data analyst may participate across all business processes that relate to the Create, Read, Update, and Delete processes (CRUD) of their master data objects.
Many conflicts occur during the blueprint phase because the business process teams often work in parallel, but independently from each other. During the blueprint phase, different teams may define functional data requirements differently. A functional data analyst or master data analyst may be the only individual able to detect potential conflicts as a result of cross-process examination of the data definitions. The detection of the potential conflicts is often by chance and is often detected manually by the analyst.
During the realization phase, the specifications defined in the blueprint phase may be implemented. The data team performs the data migration to the new application or new business processes. The functional data requirements captured during the blueprint phase may define how the new data in the new processes relate to each other. Any changes in the requirements during the realization phase may be addressed by the functional/master data analysts.